If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

From what I can see it doesn't look bad. I know welding to a pipe that has such an oxidized surface can be difficult. Try to look really close at the toes on the rusted pipe and see if you can find any underfill. It might look like undercut. In this situation as an inspector that is the place I would focus on. You know inspectors- something has to be wrong and I need to find it.

I can't tell you how many times I took someone to the hospital for broken bones. When we called it in on the way, (and when I'd write the run report) it was called a PSD for (Painful, Swollen, Deformed) extremity. We did not call them broken bones, even though we of all people were probably the best experts on the subject. You know why? Simple. Because we didn't carry an x-ray machine with us! So no matter how normal or how nasty it looked, unless we saw the bone poking through the skin, we could not definitively say whether it was broken or not.

Pipe welds are very similar. There are a lot of things you can see on the surface, but that's as deep as your eye will ever go. You'll never see the fusion of that root by looking at the cap. You'll never see slag inclusions. The last pass is the easiest thing to make look good. And its the only part you can see.

With that in mind, I can say the last pass looks pretty good, but I would have liked to have seen just a little buffer of smooth ground metal on the rusted pipe. But telling a sound weld from sight is like telling a broken bone inside a leather jacket.

The jacket looks nice.

80% of failures are from 20% of causesNever compromise your principles today in the name of furthering them in the future."All I ever wanted was an honest week's pay for an honest day's work." -Sgt. Bilko"We are generally better persuaded by reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others." -Pascal"Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything." -Pascal

bodybagger, so your kinda like a pipe paramedic. Thats cool. But I see what your saying and agree with you. Guess I might be judging this book by it's cover. Still, it's a pretty cap and in 5G, so I gotta give the guy credit.